three by tsvetaeva

Three of the legendary Russian dissident writer’s greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation.

Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. ＂Backstreets,＂ translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder. ＂Poem of the Mountain＂ and ＂Poem of the End,＂ perhaps the most celebrated of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic sequences, explore the shifting dynamics of a love affair. The voices of the lovers, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of poetry combine and recombine, circle each other and split, engaging the reader in a constantly shifting spectrum of emotion, from unbridled passion to rawest grief, and discovering at last a strange triumph in loss.

Andrew Davis’s translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was born in Moscow and published her first book of poems at seventeen. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 with her two children and her husband, Sergei Efron, who fought against the Red Army in the 1918-1921 Civil War but was later to become a Soviet spy. Often living from hand to mouth, the family remained abroad until 1939. Two years later, after the execution of her husband and the arrest of her daughter, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. Along with numerous lyrics, her works include several extraordinary long poems, among them The Poem of the End, The Poem of the Mountain, and The Ratcatcher.

Andrew Davis is a poet, cabinetmaker, and visual artist. His current project is the long poem IMPLUVIUM. He divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the north coast of Spain.